Physicians are besieged with information overload and a lack of time to see patients. For example, a typical US office-based doctor can spend 7-10 minutes on average per patient, and may see 30 patients per day. In critical settings, such as the ICU, there may be more time spent per patient, but there is a flood of information from multiple sensors, monitors, and ventilators, for example, and often decisions of life-or-death importance must be made within minutes to seconds.
Today's electronic medical records systems present raw information to the doctor, such as a list of individual diagnoses, a list of current medications, and a list of individual lab results. This is wholly insufficient for time-pressed physicians who must read and interpret each individual data point into a mental picture of the state of the patient. This process is fraught with error and is humanly unscalable as the volume of information available for a patient grows without bound. Numbers and words grow exponentially without the ability to cross-correlate or interpret them in a simple, visualizable way that fosters insight into decision making.
Systems exist that provide an anatomical avatar that shows a body part and may have pieces of medical data, such as X-rays, etc. associated with the body part that a doctor/user can access. However, these anatomical avatar systems do not interpret the pieces of medical data nor provide a visual way to assess the state of the patient or the state of a body part/organ system of the patient.
Thus, it is desirable to provide a physiological imagery generating system and method by providing a visualization of the physiology, and it is to this end that the system and method are directed.